I follow (and support) Tangle.com, an independent news source. I like the format, which presents well researched information on multiple sides of a topic, including quotes from people writing on both sides of our polarized political landscape and often other viewpoints, then opinions from the Tangle founder or other editorial staff. Also comments from readers, including those who disagree with whatever Tangle said about a topic. Yes, this is a plug for Tangle. It can be a LOT of information. I usually don’t read the whole thing and I don’t read it every day.

Wednesday’s topic was school phone bans. There is no way I can write comprehensively and/or coherently about my thoughts about this. There were no cell phones at any time I was in the public schools or college… Until I went to community college… I had a “dumb” cell phone at first and then, VOILA! An iPhone. In the 20 seconds I spent in an Apple store back in the fall of 2007, I went from “I may want a phone/camera/GPS/I-fergit-what-else device someday” to gimme gimme and the GG and I plunked down $1200 or whatever for two of them.

I enrolled in community college classes at around the age of 50. I can still remember my then college daughter telling me (a straight-A student in “childhood” college), “Moom, you do not know how to go to college,” and handing me three Kalamazoo College (her college) folders to keep my papers in. That is absolutely one of my favorite memories of her as a college student. I happily accepted the folders (and used them) and thought something like, “she’s turning into her mother🐽“

I got off on a tangent there. I think that constant phone use by students should not be tolerated in classrooms but I am not really comfortable about outright bans. On one hand, I think that letting kids use their phones unleashed in the classroom (even when silenced) would be bedlam. But I am thinking that limited communications with parents, like changes in after school plans, would be helpful to students, parents, teachers, and office staff. Of course, parents can definitely be ridiculous about not establishing appropriate communication boundaries with their kids. Don’t even get me going about that…

I’ll be thinking about this for a while but I’ll leave you with a time I was in a community college class and I knew there was a possibility that I would need to connect with my college junior that evening. She was scheduled to fly to Dakar for a six month study abroad that coming weekend and our household was kind of on high alert. Not for anything in particular, just, if you are launching one of your children on a study abroad stint, you might know what I mean.

That night, she was driving to her college (100 miles away) to meet up with friends. When I went to class that night, I told Jason (the prof, the one who hooked me up with my Corporate America job) that I needed to keep my phone on but silenced in case my kid needed to call me for anything. I assured him that I would go outside the classroom if I needed to answer my phone. I don’t think I did get a call but I think she did text that there was a big traffic backup. She certainly didn’t need to talk to me on the phone about that.

Of course it was okay with my prof (whose kids have probably done their own study abroad stints by now). But I was an old bag even then and most high school kids now have grown up with smart phones and that train has left the station and I dunno what the answer is to handling cell phone use in schools. I do know that it’s complicated. Like everything else. Hopefully a goddamn dictator will not use a sledgehammer to try to solve it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2025 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.